Winter on the urban farm and my new favorite chicken accessory

I am back after spending a couple of months working a short-term lab job in an attempt to give my mind something to think about during the long, dark days of winter, and to make a few bucks for my early spring hiking trip with my dad-- spiritual pilgrimage, bonding experience, real world Spanish practice, and the chance to use teeny, tiny backpacking accessories. I'm hoping to get some good photos and experiences worth sharing here.

For now, here's a quick update on the urban farm!

The days are getting longer and brighter!

With spring not too far off, even the snowy days seem more livable! The chickens don't like free-ranging in snow, though, so I'm looking forward to some grass for them to walk around on.

Did I mention that you can freeze whole tomatoes if you want to put off processing them?

I core them, squeeze out the seeds, and store them in zip lock bags. When frozen they are like billiard balls.

I froze these in August or early September and just turned them into spaghetti sauce in January. Because I had the freezer space (and it's easier) I decided the freeze the sauce in baggies instead of canning. I'll be sure to use this batch before my canned sauce.

The product that is going to change my view of winter chickens: 

If you keep chickens where it freezes at night, you need this heated bucket!

In the summer I use a similar watering bucket with nipples (to keep the water fresh and reduce the number of water changes). But in the winter, even with a bucket heater, the nipples freeze, so I'm back to using a dish and heater, and I have to change the dirty water at least daily. This is my new favorite water bucket (the best $40 I've spent all year). It provides clean, liquid water all winter, and I can unplug it and use it all summer, too. Fantastic! Buy it here or at your local farm supply store.

I heart my chest freezer

Until the last few days, the warm weather has been hanging on, and we've all been outside wearing shorts and riding bikes. But all that nice weather keeps the tomatoes ripening, and without intervention all the ones my family cannot eat (and that would be most of them) would go bad.

I know people love their iPhones, giant televisions, and salted caramel lattes, but to love a chest freezer is a special kind of love. This humble, quiet, out-of-the-way appliance allows me to enjoy the end of summer.

In the past, canning was done on a hot day in a hot kitchen. (If you haven't canned before, the house can heat up to a sweltering temperature if it's still warm outside.) Canning would be an ideal cold weather activity, like baking bread or making a hearty soup. A friend let me in on a secret a few years ago that changed my canning forever. She told me that you can freeze tomatoes whole in plastic bags and then take them out whenever you're ready to can. And if you let them warm up at room temperature, the skins come off without having to boil them, which is amazing when you are making a chunky tomato sauce or salsa!

My newest spaghetti sauce method is to core each tomato, squeeze out some of the seeds, and then freeze them all in gallon sized bags. When I'm ready to can, I make the sauce with the skins on (which adds additional nutrients) and then zip the sauce in the high speed blender to pulverize the skins and any remaining seeds before canning.

Many fruits and veggies are easy to freeze and use right from the freezer: sliced peppers and any kind of berry are two of my favorites.

This week at the urban farm

Now that soup weather is upon us, I've started harvesting the leeks. A lot of soup recipes call for leeks, but they are also good in many recipes in place of onions or roasted in the oven with other fall vegetables.

The chickens are just starting their first molt, and because of this egg production is almost nil. Hopefully I will have more to report on this soon! They have had a good summer of romping around the yard and have appreciated the vegetable scraps this season.

The tomatoes and flowers are the last summer plants I will pull out of the garden. The tomatoes will go when they stop ripening on the vine (I'll put the pink ones in the window and ripen them indoors). The flowers will go once they die or we get a hard freeze and the butterflies are gone for the year, whichever comes first.

A note on fall eating and cooking: it's almost time to celebrate the harvest with fall meals: butternut squash soup, spaghetti and lasagna feasts, vegetables caramelized over time in warm ovens, stuffed and roasted acorn squash! Enjoy eating these warm and cozy foods; I hope you are all having a fantastic end of season!

Payoffs of the urban farm

The harvest continues but is winding down quickly. My last boxes of veggies have been delivered to my land partners and I'm starting to take down fences and compost plants as they start to die back. With fall comes amazing food, though, and I wanted to take a few minutes today to realize some of the tangible values of urban farming other than beauty, enjoyment, the great outdoors, butterflies, and a feeling of living closer to the land. Fall is a time of thanksgiving, of reflection of the growing season, of preparing for winter... and it's lovely weather, too!

I know it's fall when the popcorn is ready to harvest. (Must also be time to store the summer clothes and dig out the mittens and wool socks!) Popcorn is so cheap to buy that people sometimes wonder why I bother. I grow it because I love to harvest it and it saves well all winter. Nothing beats a big bowl of fresh, hot, homegrown, heirloom popcorn in the middle of a snowstorm!

Carmen peppers are my absolute favorite variety! They are super sweet and a beautiful red! We've harvested a lot of them this year, so at $4.99 a pound we've come out ahead. They also freeze well, so we'll be eating them for months to come.

Tomatoes are ripening more slowly now, but we're still enjoying them daily (a money saver, but more importantly, nothing beats a ripe, garden tomato--and as you can see in this grocery store photo, home-grown, vine-ripened, heirloom tomatoes have superior quality--transportation issues are the main reason why modern, commercial varieties are pretty but tasteless!). Since we have so many, I'm canning again this year (see below).

This was almost a perfect year for tomatoes in the southern half of Wisconsin. I only irrigated one time and disease pressure at the urban farm was minimal. 

There were so many tomatoes this year, even the yellow, heirloom slicers got to go into the spaghetti sauce!

I'm still a novice canner and always looking to perfect my technique and recipes, but my sauce is pretty tasty!

Until our maple tree decides to turn red, I'm enjoying the leaves on my walks. Happy fall, y'all!

**Side note about composting from my walk last evening:

Greens and browns, people, greens and browns...not sticks. Just sayin'.

It's ok to make mistakes

I have to admit that fall snuck/sneaked* up on me this year. It's been a long summer, full of new things: trying out the farmer's market, growing in 3 locations, and succession planting on a scale I've never done before. But with the beautiful growing season (the tomatoes are still going crazy!) I totally forgot that autumn was right around the corner. Is this a big deal? Thankfully no, but I did miss planting fall radish, a few fall root crops, and most of the fall lettuce.

So this leads me to my point: as an urban farmer, it is ok to make mistakes. Although there is nothing as sweet as home-grown food, we are in the fortunate position of being able to buy food from local farmers' markets and around the world. So I am going to cut myself some slack and move on.

Don't let fear of screwing up keep you from starting a garden or growing a few patio plants. If you need  encouragement, here are a few common urban farm errors that I have made just this year:

• Go on vacation and don't set up irrigation (this is especially an issue with potted tomato plants).

• Go inside for lunch and forget that your chickens are still running around the yard. Find them later that evening (close to fox dinner time) wandering around the neighbor's yard.

• Forget to harvest zucchini until it's the size of a 6 month old Labrador puppy (this mistake can be forgiven by making zucchini bread out of the giant squash).

• Plant 30 (or some other large, unreasonable number) of eggplants, having forgotten that you are the only member of your family that remotely enjoys eggplant (this error leads to giving away vegetables to neighbors and friends, so things can turn out well in the end).

This week at the urban farm:

The lower home plots last week. I have really enjoyed the sunflowers, but they are so large this is probably their one cameo appearance at the urban farm.

Next year-- more plum tomatoes! I forgot over the winter how much I love to can. 

I've been really pleased with these "Glow" sweet peppers. They are thick-walled and very prolific in our Wisconsin cool summers, and they will turn a beautiful orange if I leave them alone long enough. 

A nice shot of one of our flower beds.

Have a great week and enjoy the fall weather!

*I prefer "snuck" as the past tense of "sneak," but I'm sure my English teacher and writer friends will appreciate that I acknowledge the more correct "sneaked." English teacher and writer friends, please comment on this and any other grammar issues I have if you have the time. 

Lazy time of year

Ah, early August. The days are warm and sunny. The plants are so large they are shading out most of the weeds. This year's rains have been just right, so not much irrigation is needed. I can just sit back and watch my tomatoes ripen! Speaking of tomatoes ripening, during this downtime I am mentally preparing my checklist for canning. Jars, lids, making sure the pressure canner is working properly. In a week or two I will be spending some hot days in the kitchen with quarts and quarts of marinara sauce. But for now, I can enjoy the cut flowers I bring in from the garden, let the chickens romp around the yard catching bugs, and steal a few cherry tomatoes and pop them into my mouth still warm from the sun.

This week at the urban farm

My new favorite cherry variety, the hybrid "Cherry Bomb," started ripening this week. I love the look and it is late blight resistant, too!

Cherry Bomb, Sun Gold, and Yellow Pear cherry tomatoes. Sun Gold are still the sweetest cherry tomatoes I've ever had. Have you found something better?

The 5 hens are laying about 3 eggs per day. No signs of molting yet, but that will be coming up sometime in late summer or early fall.

I planted these blackberries a couple of years ago for my dad, and I have a love-hate relationship with them. They have large, delicious fruits, but they are thorny and birds get most of the berries! Our raspberries are definitely my favorite fruit crop.

I can't say enough about cut flowers. If I have the space, I will always grow them. They bring so much beauty (and so many pollinators!) to our urban farm.

After only one week away...

As the days of summer get shorter but warmer, after only a week away from the urban farm I came home to a jungle of tomato plants, huge and heavy with long-awaited ripening fruits. The sunflowers had shot up well over my head, and even with daily inspections from my family, a couple of zucchini squash got away and became sizable clubs, perfect for shredding up and baking into chocolate chip zucchini muffins. It's also time to start canning. This year, Italian peppers are the first to go into the boiling water. I look forward to mixing them with olive oil and scooping it all up with a local baguette this winter.

There should be a walkway in the middle!

The mess is worth it for the great veggies this time of year.

Peppers and carrots + garlic and spices + vinegar and olive oil = love!

Knowing I will eat food in the winter that I put away myself helps me look forward to the cold months ahead.

Growing for pleasure

I've written a lot about urban farming for food and self-sustainability and using organic and sustainable practices for the environment and health. One thing I don't write about much is the pure joy of growing plants and eating the produce. This weekend I had the opportunity to host a church group for a tour of our plots, and it gave me great pleasure to walk with friends among the green plants, to have samples of vegetables to eat, and to see small children pulling carrots and beets right out of the ground, washing those beautiful carrots with the hose and and eating them still warm from the sun. It made my heart happy to share stories, both bragging about our successes and commiserating about droughts, June bugs, and hungry bunnies. So if you decide to grow your own food, I'd put pleasure at the top of the list of reasons why.

The first cherry tomatoes are ripe this week, the earliest being the orange hybrid variety 'Sun Gold'.

Green beans are in season. This variety is called 'Provider'.

Raspberries grow very well in our local soil that is not acidic enough for blueberries. We always have plenty to eat fresh and freeze for the rest of the year.

Cut flowers are in bloom!

We have squash now, tomatoes, peppers, and garlic very soon, and eggplant after that. Almost ratatouille time!

Tomatoes as houseplants

Two Wheels Urban Farm Update

Spring is here and the transplants are going! So far we have peppers, eggplants, tomatillos, onions, leeks, and lettuce. Hopefully our spring will dry out a bit and give me some pre-season time to prepare the beds for transplanting (transplanting is my favorite time of the year!).

Leek sprouts

Indoor Tomatoes

This winter I set up a light and shelving system for growing the urban farm's transplants this spring. I did some testing back in December with tomato plants and afterwards decided I couldn't throw out all of these healthy, beautiful plants, so I kept a single cherry tomato. The variety I kept was a Sunburst, which is indeterminate-- this means that it will continue to flower and grow new stems over time. Hypothetically, unless my plant gets diseased or I forget to water it, it should last indefinitely, just like your everyday house plant. I have my friend Lea to thank for her inspiration. She told me about a tomato plant living indoors in Alaska, and I realized there is no reason I can't make this work!

Interested in growing your own indoor tomato? Here are some steps to help you.

The pot I used is 10 inches across and 5 inches deep. I would think you could go quite a bit larger, but you definitely don't need to use a large pot. 

Transplant your seedling into very light soil or soiless planting mix. I used what I had around at the time, which is a soiless seedling mix. Anything light should work, since the objective is to keep the roots aerated.

I water my plant every day or two when the soil starts to dry (this depends on the size of the plant and how sunny and warm it's been) and I fertilize once a week with a water soluble organic vegetable fertilizer.

South-facing window.

Your plant should live in a south-facing window if at all possible. Even with this set up, because the winter is so dark here (the sun is very low in the horizon and there are a lot of cloudy days) I still need to keep some supplementary lights going during the day. I used two 18" grow bulbs in shop light fixtures (I picked up these lights with the fixtures for about $15 each at the hardware store). I keep the lights on from 6am until 10pm. But now that it's spring, there is a lot of light so I don't need to use them.

Your indeterminate tomato plant will need some kind of physical support-- this could be a traditional tomato cage or you could tie it up to a window.

The flowers will need a little help to become pollinated!

Lastly, and most importantly, how do you get fruit? At first I had flowers but no fruit. Then I realized that there were no insects flying into my flowers to spread the pollen around. In order to mimic those bugs, once you have flowers on your plant, give the flowers a gentle shake once a day to get that pollen spread around!

Starting to ripen...

Ready to eat!

If you decide to grow an indoor tomato, let me know how it goes!

The ugly side of winter and Parrot Flower Power

Typically winters in the upper Midwest are snowy, with many bright days and surprisingly bright nights, when the snow reflects all of the light and makes midnight look like daytime. This is especially pleasant to view if you have an outdoor hot tub available.

But this winter we have had some oddly warm days followed by normally cold temperatures, resulting in melted snow turning to ice.

The low spot in my yard collected all of the melting snow and then froze into a solid mass of dirty ice (unfortunately, I have to cross this twice a day to check on the hens-- Yaktrax really do help).

It's hard to believe it with the mini glacier in my yard, but planting starts next month (indoors) so I've started working on my planting plan. (A sneak peak at the 2017 season will be in the blog next week!)

For now, my new toy!


Parrot Flower Power

The Flower Power is a small, waterproof, indoor/outdoor sensor that gives real time (as well as historical) information on a plant's growing environment. I decided to try one out because we needed temperature information under the indoor lighting system. There is a slick app to run this Bluetooth enabled device, so I can sit in the living room and watch tv while checking on the plants. Not only does it track temperature, it also monitors light intensity, fertility, and moisture. The only thing it's missing is the ability to monitor humidity.

The Flower Power is set up to monitor the conditions for a specific type of plant. In the app, the user designates the plant type and the advice given is species-specific.

The app's display is easy to understand and the reminders to water and fertilize are handy.

The Flower Power has been fun to play with, especially with my tomato plant. The light I'm using isn't really bright enough for tomatoes (they need very intense light), but it's good enough that I do have some baby tomatoes-- fingers crossed some of them mature! Luckily, the lights work great for growing baby salad greens!

Baby tomato and a flat of salad mix.

Baby greens with some lovely organic tomatoes from the co-op. A 10" x 20" flat of densely seeded salad mix gave us 10 side salads. And the baby greens are so cute! I've never seen anything like them for sale.

So for now, I'm thinking ahead to spring weather, but keeping my fingers crossed for some nice, new snow for fat biking before the winter is over. I'm also enjoying my last 45 flexible winter days, because once I start growing transplants, the fun doesn't stop until fall!

Recipe day: what to do with all those cherry tomatoes

I've had my second year in a row with a bumper crop of Sunburst cherry tomatoes. I was amused the other day walking through our local grocery chain when I saw this display:

10.5 ounces of conventionally grown tomatoes for $3.49 seemed like a good deal until I looked back and realized that so far this summer I've harvested over 10 pounds of these tomatoes from two plants (not including the ones we pick and eat while working outside). And my tomatoes have zero food miles and are grown organically.

Cherry tomatoes are often very prolific, but who REALLY needs 10+ pounds of cherry tomatoes over just a few summer weeks? There are only so many salads one can eat, only so many tomatoes the neighbors will take, and even though the chickens love to eat them, it seems like such a waste to feed them to the birds.

My friend Molly gave me a wonderful tip last summer on how to dry and save these tiny, sweet tomatoes. I tried it last year and liked it so much I knew I needed to share this secret. Whether you grow your own or you get too many cherry tomatoes from your CSA, this is a wonderful way to stretch the joy of the harvest out into the winter without too much trouble.

You can use these tomatoes in the same way you would use any sundried tomatoes. We especially like them on pizza or tossed with pasta, olive oil, and shredded parmesan. I've also thrown them in stir fried vegetables for an added sweet and tangy flavor.

How to do it:

• Lightly grease a baking dish
• Pre-heat oven to 250F
• Chop tomatoes in half and arrange them skin side down
• Bake for 2 hours (I check them about half way through)
• The tomatoes are done with they have mostly dried out
• When finished cooking, allow the baking dish to cool completely
• Place baking dish in the freezer for a few hours until the tomatoes are frozen
• Using a spatula, pick up tomatoes and store them in a baggie or other freezer-safe container
• The frozen tomatoes should last until the next summer

Tomatoes ready for the oven.

Dried out and ready to freeze. Like berries, freezing these separately on a tray keeps them from sticking together and makes them easier to use.

Oven-dried cherry tomatoes will be delicious in a fast weekday meal or on my Super Bowl pizza this winter!

In other news!

The little rain garden that I planted early in the summer has attracted Monarch butterflies, and we now have caterpillars. I am very excited about this urban farm update!

Have a great week everyone!